Land of liquid gold

Greek cuisine-from delicious mezes to shellfish-might be 'tightly bound to the sparse soil and the blue sea', but it is sorely underrated, laments Tom Parker Bowles

- Tom Parker Bowles

ATHENAEUS of Naucratis was an ancient Greek rhetorician and grammarian. Yet, in those rare moments when he wasn't orating, proclaiming or most definitely not splitting his infinitives, he wrote 15 volumes of Deipnosophistae, or 'dinner-table philosophers', an epic tale of an epic banquet where conversation covered everything from cooks and recipes through seasonality and sex, to feasts, frivolities, festivities, morality and wine. The books can, as you might imagine, go on somewhat, but these wordy tomes were food writing in its very earliest form. Albeit with a judicious dash of sophistry.

But, when it comes to the art of cooking, the Greeks have been masters for many a millennia. Food plays a central role in Homer's Odyssey, with endless 'hulking sheep' and 'fatted goats' being roasted over open fires, not to mention those lovely lotus flowers, the delectable (but ultimately, deadly) Oxen of the Sun, and, of course, one of the earliest recorded sausages, 'filled with fat and blood'. The Spartans were said to gain their might from the 'black soup' upon which they were raised, a fairly visceral liquid black pudding. Whereas olive oil, 'liquid gold' in Homer's eternal words, is the very lifeblood of Greek food, pressed from the fruit of the sacred tree. 'A taste older than meat, older than wine,' writes Lawrence Durrell in Prospero's Cell.